When it comes to marketing, your goal is to generate business for your company. The first step in effectively reaching your potential customers is making sure that you fully research them inside and out. Without an in-depth understanding of your target audience, you will not be able to send out the right message to the right person, which can challenge your marketing efforts.
Understand Your Target Audience
Dive deeper into the minds of your target audience with these helpful tips:
Problem-Solve
Before researching your target audience, you need to make sure that you have a clear understanding of what the product or service is that you are trying to sell. This may seem obvious, but it will play a big role in how you will eventually market your product or service to your potential customers. First, figure out the problem that your product or service will solve in order to determine who would be willing to pay for your solution.
What You Should Know
Learning about your target audience is the key to creating a successful marketing strategy that will increase sales. Begin researching information about your industry, market, competition and potential customers.
Demographics
Demographic information can help you to identify the type of person who will most likely be interested in purchasing your product or service. Some of the key information you will need to gather includes: age, gender, location, education level, income, marital status and ethnic background.
Psychographics
Psychographic information identifies personality and behavior traits of an individual and what makes them take action. This data should include: interests, values, hobbies, behaviors and lifestyle.
How to Research Your Target Audience
There are a variety of ways to find information about your target audience.
Sales Team
These individuals understand the needs, wants and problems of your target audience. They are a great source to use for feedback and suggestions, along with ways to increase communication between marketing and sales.
Social Media
As a marketer, you can gain valuable information by monitoring their behavior on various social media sites. You can see what type of content they are most interested in based on comments, shares and likes. This will help you to analyze where they spend most of the time.
Develop Your Buyer Personas
Once you have done your research and have an understanding of the demographics and psychographics of your target audience, you will be able to start identifying similar themes and patterns, which will help you create different buyer personas.
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional characterization of who your ideal customer is based on market research and real data about your existing customers. This gives you an overall look at why they may want to try your product or service, what features and content are most important to them and what benefits they are looking for. Remember, details matter!
HubSpot’s Helpful Tool
Use HubSpot’s tool to help guide you through the buyer persona creation process. This tool will help you to understand your customers better. When creating your buyer personas you will want to review your research and compile your data in order to create a five-chapter (topic) story:
- Job and demographic information
- What does a day in their life look like?
- What are their challenges or pain points?
- Where do they go for information?
- What common objections do they have to your products or services?
